Darkness My Old Friend

lost its charm. But she didn’t. She still loved to bake cookies.

“I have to take the bus,” she said to Cole. She stuffed the phone into her bag. “She said you could come over.”

She felt that anxiety well up, that fear that he would think she was a giant dork and that he’d rather be with Jolie, who could go anywhere and do anything she wanted to do.

“Cool,” he said. “See you there.”

He read something on her face, gave her that quick, shy smile he had. “I’ll be there this time. Promise.”

And then he was gone. Mom thought he was too old for her. Next year he’d be a senior and she’d be a sophomore. Mom thought he had too many problems. He’s got a lot on his plate for a kid. His dad’s in jail. His mom is out of work. I don’t want his baggage to become yours. What did that even mean? And then, of course, there was the big talk about sex. And how Willow wasn’t ready, and how it was a special thing that she was too young to understand, and how she shouldn’t make the choice to share herself that way yet. And that she had to promise to talk to Bethany if she was thinking about it, and not to do anything until she did. How disgusting was it to talk to your mother about things like that? Anyway, Willow so wasn’t there. She didn’t even want to think about that.

“Are you going to have sex with Mr. Ivy?” Willow had asked. She drew out his name into a playful taunt.

“Willow!” Bethany had said. Bull’s-eye. Willow was off the hook. A high red blush lit up her mother’s face. “Please! That is so not your business.”

“Are you going to see him again?” she asked. Because that’s what she really wanted to know.

“At the moment we’re just friends.”

“But you like him like him, right? You don’t just friend like him.”

Honesty, that was the other promise. No secrets and half-truths. No lies. Her mother looked away. “Yes, I like him like him. But there’s no guarantee he feels the same way. Our first date did not exactly go seamlessly.”

“He likes you,” Willow said. “I can tell.”

“Whatever,” Bethany said. “Whatever it winds up being, it’s going to be very slow. So you don’t have anything to worry about. It’s not going to affect your life at all.”

Willow got on the bus and sat in the back. She put her earbuds in and listened to Lady Gaga as the bus wound its way home. They passed the silver-gray pond surrounded by trees losing their leaves. And the sky above was blue with high white clouds, and the light was already going golden. The days were growing short. As the bus pulled to a stop in front of her drive, a flock of birds startled and fluttered noisily away. When she stepped outside and the bus pulled away, she was left with that silence she’d grown to appreciate and the smell of pine, somewhere the scent of burning wood. Maybe Mr. Vance was right. The Hollows wasn’t that bad.

chapter thirty-nine

Jones was behind on the leaves. The lawn was almost covered with them. Maggie wanted him to get a leaf blower, but he liked the exercise of raking. Going to the gym and logging miles on a machine seemed like a waste of time. Everyone was pounding away on some piece of equipment, staring at a television screen, with headphones in ears. That couldn’t be healthy, could it? At least when he was raking, he was outside, taking in the air, accomplishing something. But it seemed like he’d been raking for hours. And he hadn’t even scratched the surface.

To his dismay and annoyance, the mourning doves had made a nest in the upper corner of the porch roof. He’d heard them cooing when he came out to get the paper and looked up to see them nestled together in a small pile of twigs and scraps of newspaper on a little ledge that Jones hadn’t even noticed before.

“Oh, leave them,” said Maggie. “They’re so cute, and it’s going to be cold this winter. Maybe we should hang a bird feeder.”

“No,” he said. “No way. They have to go.”

“Don’t be such an old crank.”

“They carry lice, you know.”

“Oh, Jones.”

Now the doves sat on the rail, cuddling together, looking sweet. They knew they had Maggie on their side, didn’t they? If he got rid of their nest while they were out doing their mourning-dove things, he’d be in trouble. He leaned his rake against the tree, dropped his gloves on the ground, and walked inside through the garage so that he wouldn’t have to walk past those smug little birds. He’d find a nice way to relocate them, just move the nest somewhere. Maybe when Maggie was over at her mother’s later.

Inside, on the old table in the kitchen sat a copy of the Hollows Gazette. There was an article in there about the discovery of Marla Holt’s remains. He’d been mentioned in the article as the retired cop-turned-private investigator. He didn’t know where the reporter had gotten her information. The phone started ringing a couple of hours after the paper hit the driveways. There was no mention in the article of the circumstances under which Jones had retired. And it seemed that no one remembered or cared.

Maggie had been taking messages. A woman wanted to find her sister who had been missing since 1985. A man wanted his wife followed-you know, just to be sure she was faithful. There were a couple of others-someone wanted a background check on his daughter’s boyfriend. One lady’s dog had run away, and could he help? PI work was not glamorous.

“I told you you’d be surprised,” Maggie had said after he’d read through the stack.

“I’m not taking jobs like that,” he’d said.

“Jobs like what?”

“You know, following cheating spouses, checking up on boyfriends, tailing people collecting Workers’ Comp. That’s lower than I’m willing to go.”

Maggie put her hand on his face, delivered a kiss to his forehead. “Just do what moves you.”

Holding the newspaper in his hand, he thought about that sentence. What moved him? He wasn’t sure he knew. Rather, he wasn’t sure he could put it into words. He figured he’d know it when he found it.

***

A couple of hours later, he was in Dr. Dahl’s office running down the week’s events.

“So I guess we know what phase two is,” said the doctor. “Is private-investigative work where you want to put your energies?”

Jones picked up on something from the doctor. Was it disappointment?

“Is there something wrong with that?” he asked.

“No,” said Dr. Dahl. “Of course not. I just wondered if there was anything else you wanted to look at. You haven’t made any firm decisions. We’d talked about woodworking.”

Somehow Jones just couldn’t see himself making bookshelves for a living. It’s not like he had some drive to be a designer or any real passion for it. He had some native ability, enjoyed working with his hands. But it wasn’t something that fascinated him, not in the same way that police work had. He told the doctor as much.

“Well, good,” he said. He smoothed out his perfectly creased charcoal slacks, fixed Jones with a warm smile. “Passion is important. I just wonder if it’s not the darkness of it all that calls you, Jones.”

Jones didn’t know what to say to that. Something about it smarted, made him feel the rise of that anger.

“It’s gritty work,” the doctor said. “There’s danger. You said yourself you could have died.”

“But I didn’t,” he said. “I saved that girl. If I hadn’t freed her foot, she would have drowned. That means something to me.”

“Of course it does,” said the doctor. “Of course.”

Since the night of his near drowning, the nightmares had ceased. He hadn’t been waking up sweating, yelling, gasping for air in a full week. Maggie had moved back into the bedroom and stayed the whole night. He wouldn’t say that he’d conquered his fear of death; it was a specter that lingered. It snuck up on him when he least